Lesbians Raped Or Forced 2 Sex By Trans Men - Fight Between Trans And Feminists

Is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women? Some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners - then shunned and even threatened for speaking out. Several have spoken to the BBC, along with trans women who are concerned about the issue too. Proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act have sparked a bitter divide between the trans community and groups of feminists. Sky's Lucy Cotter has been looking at the fierce opposition facing the Government over proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. The Transgender community wants to simplify the process of transitioning, including the right to self-identify in a preferred gender - rather than face an extensive assessment.Show more

I was sexually assaulted in prison. Overhaul the system to protect the trans community. I, like many who suffer in prison, didn't report these rapes. That would have only put me in solitary and threatened my chances of reentering society.

I am a Black transgender woman who was harassed, physically assaulted and raped while I was incarcerated in New York state prisons. Despite federal law requiring prisons and jails to prevent rape and to support survivors, I lived in constant danger and fear of being sexually assaulted.

At one prison, I was an aide charged with putting away materials after class. While I was going about my task, another incarcerated person entered the room, locking the door behind him.

He was a hulking figure. I couldn’t fight him; he would have crushed me. There were no corrections officers or staff in sight. I had no way out. I got down on my hands and knees as he forced me to perform oral sex. He threw three packs of cigarettes on the table before he left – as payment or a gift or maybe a sick joke? I don’t know because there was no conversation, just the unspoken threat of violence.

Transgender woman 'RAPED girl of 15' in former life as a man A transgender woman raped a teenage girl before she changed gender, a court has heard. Davina Ayrton is accused of pinning down a 15-year-old and starting to suffocate her in a drunken sex attack.

Ayrton, who is now 34, allegedly raped the teen in 2004. At the time, Ayrton was still a man and used the name David.

Jurors heard that Ayrton, from Fording bridge, Hampshire, has learning difficulties. His alleged victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, described the ordeal in a video interview played to Portsmouth Crown Court.

In the footage, she said: "He just lay on top of me, it must have been seconds but it felt like it was minutes. He just sat up as if it was nothing." She added that she couldn't breathe when Ayrton tried to kiss her.

"I'm sure there was a point I went to slap him but I couldn't move my arm.

"I said get off me. I said it three or four times. It was more his weight on me at that point.

"That's when he was kissing my face, slobbering on my face. I couldn't breathe."

The court also heard they had both been drinking alcohol and the victim said Ayrton held one of her arms while the other was trapped against the back of the sofa. She said she had not wanted to tell people about the rape at the time, and initially refused to speak to police officers about it.

However, the court heard that the case came to the authorities' attentions again after Ayrton confessed to a care home worker in 2014.

Judge Ian Pearson told jurors that Ayrton has learning difficulties. He said: "At the time of this allegation in 2004 the defendant was a male with the name of David Ayrton." - Ayrton, who was 25 at the time of the alleged attack, pleaded not guilty to a single count of rape between October and November 2004.

The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women. "I've had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler," says 24-year-old Jennie*.

"They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent, just because I won't have sex with trans women."

Jennie is a lesbian woman. She says she is only sexually attracted to women who are biologically female and have vaginas. She therefore only has sex and relationships with women who are biologically female.

Jennie doesn't think this should be controversial, but not everyone agrees. She has been described as transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert and a "terf" - a trans exclusionary radical feminist.

What does transgender mean and what does the law say?
"There's a common argument that they try and use that goes 'What if you met a woman in a bar and she's really beautiful and you got on really well and you went home and you discovered that she has a penis? Would you just not be interested?'" says Jennie, who lives in London and works in fashion.

"Yes, because even if someone seems attractive at first you can go off them. I just don't possess the capacity to be sexually attracted to people who are biologically male, regardless of how they identify." I became aware of this particular issue after I wrote an article about sex, lies and legal consent.

Several people got in touch with me to say there was a "huge problem" for lesbians, who were being pressured to "accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ".

I knew this would be a hugely divisive subject, but I wanted to find out how widespread the issue was.

Ultimately, it has been difficult to determine the true scale of the problem because there has been little research on this topic - only one survey to my knowledge. However, those affected have told me the pressure comes from a minority of trans women, as well as activists who are not necessarily trans themselves.

They described being harassed and silenced if they tried to discuss the issue openly. I received online abuse myself when I tried to find interviewees using social media. One of the lesbian women I spoke to, 24-year-old Amy*, told me she experienced verbal abuse from her own girlfriend, a bisexual woman who wanted them to have a threesome with a trans woman.

When Amy explained her reasons for not wanting to, her girlfriend became angry.

"The first thing she called me was transphobic," Amy said. "She immediately jumped to make me feel guilty about not wanting to sleep with someone."

She said the trans woman in question had not undergone genital surgery, so still had a penis.

"I know there is zero possibility for me to be attracted to this person," said Amy, who lives in the south west of England and works in a small print and design studio.

"I can hear their male vocal cords. I can see their male jawline. I know, under their clothes, there is male genitalia. These are physical realities, that, as a woman who likes women, you can't just ignore."

Amy said she would feel this way even if a trans woman had undergone genital surgery - which some opt for, while many don't.

Soon afterwards Amy and her girlfriend split up.

"I remember she was extremely shocked and angry, and claimed my views were extremist propaganda and inciting violence towards the trans community, as well as comparing me to far-right groups," she said. Another lesbian woman, 26-year-old Chloe*, said she felt so pressured she ended up having penetrative sex with a trans woman at university after repeatedly explaining she was not interested.

They lived near each other in halls of residence. Chloe had been drinking alcohol and does not think she could have given proper consent.

"I felt very bad for hating every moment, because the idea is we are attracted to gender rather than sex, and I did not feel that, and I felt bad for feeling like that," she said.

Ashamed and embarrassed, she decided not to tell anyone.

"The language at the time was very much 'trans women are women, they are always women, lesbians should date them'. And I was like, that's the reason I rejected this person. Does that make me bad? Am I not going to be allowed to be in the LGBT community anymore? Am I going to face repercussions for that instead?' So I didn't actually tell anyone." Hearing about experiences like these led one lesbian activist to begin researching the topic. Angela C. Wild is co-founder of Get The L Out, whose members believe the rights of lesbians are being ignored by much of the current LGBT movement.

She and her fellow activists have demonstrated at Pride marches in the UK, where they have faced opposition. Pride in London accused the group of "bigotry, ignorance and hate".

"Lesbians are still extremely scared to speak because they think they won't be believed, because the trans ideology is so silencing everywhere," she said.

Angela created a questionnaire for lesbians and distributed it via social media, then published the results.

She said that of the 80 women who did respond, the majority reported being pressured or coerced to accept a trans woman as a sexual partner.

The survey was not statistically valid since the respondents were self-selecting and Get The L Out is an active campaigning group on lesbian issues. But while Angela acknowledges the sample may not be representative of the wider lesbian community, she believes it was important to capture their "points of view and stories".

As well as experiencing pressure to go on dates or engage in sexual activity with trans women, some of the respondents reported being successfully persuaded to do so.

"I thought I would be called a transphobe or that it would be wrong of me to turn down a trans woman who wanted to exchange nude pictures," one wrote. "Young women feel pressured to sleep with trans women 'to prove I am not a terf'."

One woman reported being targeted in an online group. "I was told that homosexuality doesn't exist and I owed it to my trans sisters to unlearn my 'genital confusion' so I can enjoy letting them penetrate me," she wrote. One compared going on dates with trans women to so-called conversion therapy - the controversial practice of trying to change someone's sexual orientation.

"I knew I wasn't attracted to them but internalised the idea that it was because of my 'transmisogyny' and that if I dated them for long enough I could start to be attracted to them. It was DIY conversion therapy," she wrote.

Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.

"[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me."

While welcomed by some in the LGBT community, Angela's report was described as transphobic by others.

"[People said] we are worse than rapists because we [supposedly] try to frame every trans woman as a rapist," said Angela.

"This is not the point. The point is that if it happens we need to speak about it. If it happens to one woman it's wrong. As it turns out it happens to more than one woman." Trans YouTuber Rose of Dawn has discussed the issue on her channel in a video called "Is Not Dating Trans People 'Transphobic'?"

"This is something I've seen happen in real life to friends of mine. This was happening before I actually started my channel and it was one of the things that spurred it on," said Rose.

"What's happening is women who are attracted to biological females and female genitalia are finding themselves put in very awkward positions, where if for example on a dating website a trans woman approaches them and they say 'sorry I'm not into trans women', then they are labelled as transphobic."

Rose made the video in response to a series of tweets by trans athlete Veronica Ivy, then known as Rachel McKinnon, who wrote about hypothetical scenarios where trans people are rejected, and argued that "genital preferences" are transphobic. Rose believes views like this are "incredibly toxic". She believes the idea that dating preferences are transphobic is being pushed by radical trans activists and their "self-proclaimed allies", who have extreme views which don't reflect the views of trans women she knows in real life.

"Certainly from my own friends group, the trans women I'm friends with, almost all of them agree lesbians are free to exclude trans women from their dating pool," she said.

However, she believes even trans people are afraid to talk openly about this for fear of abuse.

"People like me receive quite a lot of abuse from trans activists and their allies," she said. "The trans activist side is incredibly rabid against people who they see as stepping out of line."

Debbie Hayton, a science teacher who transitioned in 2012 and writes about trans issues, worries some people transition without realising how hard it will be to form relationships.

Although there is currently little data on the sexual orientation of trans women, she believes most are female-attracted because they are biologically male and most males are attracted to women.

"So when they [trans women] are trying to find partners, when lesbian women say 'we want women', and heterosexual women say they want a heterosexual man, that leaves trans women isolated from relationships, and possibly feeling very let down by society, angry, upset and feeling that the world is out to get them," she said.

Debbie thinks it's fine if a lesbian woman does not want to date a trans woman, but is concerned some are being pressured to do so.

"The way that shaming is used is just horrific; it's emotional manipulation and warfare going on," she said. "These women who want to form relationships with other biological women are feeling bad about that. How did we get here?"

Stonewall is the largest LGBT organisation in the UK and Europe. I asked the charity about these issues but it was unable to provide anyone for interview. However, in a statement, chief executive Nancy Kelley likened not wanting to date trans people to not wanting to date people of colour, fat people, or disabled people.

She said: "Sexuality is personal and something which is unique to each of us. There is no 'right' way to be a lesbian, and only we can know who we're attracted to.

"Nobody should ever be pressured into dating, or pressured into dating people they aren't attracted to. But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it's worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions. "We know that prejudice is still common in the LGBT+ community, and it's important that we can talk about that openly and honestly."

Stonewall was founded in 1989 by people opposed to what was known as Section 28 - legislation which stopped councils and schools from "promoting" homosexuality. The organisation originally focused on issues affecting lesbian, gay and bisexual people, then in 2015 announced it would campaign for "trans equality".

A new group - LGB Alliance - has been formed partly in response to Stonewall's change of focus, by people who believe the interests of LGB people are being left behind.

"It's fair to say that I didn't expect to have to fight for these rights again, the rights of people whose sexual orientation is towards people of the same sex," said co-founder Bev Jackson, who also co-founded the UK Gay Liberation Front in 1970. "We sort of thought that battle had been won and it's quite frightening and quite horrifying that we have to fight that battle again."

LGB Alliance says it is particularly concerned about younger and therefore more vulnerable lesbians being pressured into relationships with trans women.

"It's very disturbing that you find people saying 'It doesn't happen, nobody pressures anybody to go to bed with anybody else', but we know this is not the case," said Ms Jackson.

"We know a minority, but still a sizeable minority of trans women, do pressure lesbians to go out with them and have sex with them and it's a very disturbing phenomenon."

I asked Ms Jackson how she knew a "sizeable minority" of trans women were doing this. She said: "We don't have figures but we are frequently contacted by lesbians who relate their experience in LGBT groups and on dating sites."

Why does she think there has been so little research?

"I certainly think research on this topic would be discouraged, presumably because it would be characterised as a deliberately discriminatory project," she said.

"But also, the girls and young women themselves, since it's likely the shyest and least experienced young women who are the victims of such encounters, would be loath to discuss them."

LGB Alliance has been described as a hate group, anti-trans and transphobic. However, Ms Jackson insists the group is none of these things, and includes trans people among its supporters.

"This word transphobia has been placed like a dragon in the path to stop discussion about really important issues," she said. "It's hurtful to our trans supporters, it's hurtful to all our supporters, to be called a hate group when we're the least hateful people you can find."

The term "cotton ceiling" is sometimes used when discussing these issues, but it is controversial.

It stems from "glass ceiling", which refers to an invisible barrier preventing women from climbing to the top of the career ladder. Cotton is a reference to women's underwear, with the phrase intended to represent the difficulty some trans women feel they face when seeking relationships or sex. "Breaking the cotton ceiling" means being able to have sex with a woman.

The term is first thought to have been used in 2012 by a trans porn actress going by the name of Drew DeVeaux. She no longer works in the industry and I have not been able to contact her. However, the concept of the cotton ceiling came to wider attention when it was used in the title of a workshop by Planned Parenthood Toronto.

The title of the workshop was: "Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women", and the description explained how participants would "work together to identify barriers, strategize ways to overcome them, and build community".

It was led by a trans writer and artist who later went to work for Stonewall (the organisation has asked the BBC not to name her because of safeguarding concerns).

The trans woman who led the workshop declined to speak to the BBC, but Planned Parenthood Toronto stood by its decision to hold the workshop.

In a statement sent to the BBC, executive director Sarah Hobbs said the workshop "was never intended to advocate or promote overcoming any individual woman's objections to sexual activity". Instead, she said the workshop explored "the ways in which ideologies of transphobia and transmisogyny impact sexual desire".

In addition to Veronica Ivy, I contacted several other high profile trans women who have either written or spoken about sex and relationships. None of them wanted to speak to me but my editors and I felt it was important to reflect some of their views in this piece.

In a video which has now been deleted, YouTuber Riley J Dennis argued that dating "preferences" are discriminatory.

She asked: "Would you date a trans person, honestly? Think about it for a second. OK, got your answer? Well if you said no, I'm sorry but that's pretty discriminatory."

She explained: "I think the main concern that people have in regards to dating a trans person is that they won't have the genitals that they expect. Because we associate penises with men and vaginas with women, some people think they could never date a trans man with a vagina or a trans woman with a penis.

"But I think that people are more than their genitals. I think you can feel attraction to someone without knowing what's between their legs. And if you were to say that you're only attracted to people with vaginas or people with penises it really feels like you are reducing people just to their genitals."

Another YouTuber, Danielle Piergallini, made a video titled "The Cotton Ceiling: Transphobia, Sex, and Dating (but not transsexuals)".

She said: "I want to talk about the idea that there are a number of people out there who say they're not attracted to trans people, and I think that that is transphobic because any time you're making a broad generalised statement about a group of people that's typically not coming from a good place."

However, she added: "If there is a trans woman who is pre-op and somebody doesn't want to date them because they don't have the genitals that match their preference, that's obviously understandable."

Novelist and poet Roz Kaveney wrote an article called "Some Thoughts on the Cotton Ceiling" and another called "More Cotton Ceiling".

"What is always going on is an assumption that the person is the current status of their bits, and the history of their bits," she wrote in the first article. "Which is about as reductive a model of sexual attraction as I can imagine."

While this debate was once seen as a fringe issue, most of the interviewees who spoke to me said it has become prominent in recent years because of social media. Ani, who is 30, told the BBC she is concerned for the generation of lesbians who are now in their teens.

"What we are seeing is a regression where once again young lesbians are being told 'How do you know you don't like dick if you haven't tried it?'" she said.

"We get told we should be looking beyond genitals and should accept that someone says they are a woman, and that's not what homosexuality is.

"You don't see as many trans men interested in gay men so they don't get it [the pressure] as much, but you do see a lot of trans women who are interested in women, so we are disproportionately affected by it."

Ani believes these kind of messages are confusing for young lesbians.

"I remember being a teenager in the closet and trying desperately to be straight, and that was hard enough," she said.

"I can't imagine what it would have been like, if I'd finally come to terms with the fact I was gay, to then be faced with the idea that some male bodies are not male so they must be lesbian, and having to contend with that as well." Ani says she gets contacted on Twitter by young lesbians who do not know how to exit a relationship with a trans woman.

"They tried to do the right thing and they gave them a chance, and realised that they are a lesbian and they didn't want to be with someone with a male body, and the concept of transphobia and bigotry is used as an emotional weapon, that you can't leave because otherwise you're a transphobe," she said.

Like others who have voiced their concerns, Ani has received abuse online.

"I've been incited to kill myself, I've had rape threats," she said. However, she says she is determined to keep speaking out.

"A really important thing for us to do is to be able to talk these things through. Shutting down these conversations and calling them bigotry is really unhelpful, and it shouldn't be beyond our ability to have hard conversations about some of these things." *The new world order has changed the names of some of those featured in this article to protect their identities.

What everyone should understand about dating a trans woman. Yes I'm a transgender woman, but it doesn’t mean the people I date actually respect or treat me like a woman. Maybe they fancy me, but they don’t always respect me, and treat me the way I should be treated. Here's what I wish people know about dating me and other trans girls.

Don't see me as a fetish or a novelty
A lot of men see me as a kind of fetish. I went on a date recently, and the guy said, "Ah, I've never dated a trans woman before".

He went on to say he'd been wondering how I'd tucked my "penis" away. When I told him I have a vagina, he replied, "Oh my god, no way." Don't assume all trans women have the same body (or personality)
I told that guy you can’t just assume all trans women have the same body. That’s like me assuming every man I date has a big chopper... trust me, in my experience, they don’t. You can’t just stereotype and make your own assumptions.

"People have this fixed idea of me"
Because of the 'label' of being trans, people have this fixed idea of me. Not every trans woman is the same, and that’s what people need to realise. We’re definitely not all the same in personality either. Plus, being trans means different things to different people.

Don't treat me like a Google search
I go on dates with so many men that treat the date almost like some kind of information finder. They ask so many questions like, "So how did you do this?" You should be dating me as a person, not some kind of Google search about what trans is. If you’re curious to find out about what trans women go through, do that research yourself.

Ask me normal date questions
On a date, I want to be treated as any other woman does. So talk about normal date things, and ask me questions like, "What are you into?" and "What food do you like?"

Understand sexuality and gender are two different things
One straight guy I dated said, "It’s funny I’ve met you because I have been questioning my sexuality a bit recently". I was like, "Woah, I'm going to stop you right there". People don't seem to understand sexuality and gender are two completely different things.

Because you’re dating a trans girl, it does not affect your sexuality at all. I told him, "You’re attracted to me because I’m a woman. When you saw me, did you think, 'wow that’s a hot woman'? Exactly. You’re attracted to me as a woman, so you're still straight".

Respect my sexuality
People I know have said to me, "I've got this guy I want to introduce you to, he’s gay as well." And I’m like, "No, I’m a straight woman." So many people get this confused. It's really not that difficult to understand.

Dating me doesn't change your sexuality
Sadly, there’s still a lot of stigma around straight men dating trans women. A lot of straight men get a lot of opinions thrown at them about their sexuality because of it. But remember no, she’s a woman. Just because you’re dating a trans woman, it doesn’t make you any less of a man, or any less straight.

Don't keep me a secret
Because of that stigma, people I date often feel they need to keep me a secret. And that’s disrespectful. I don’t blame straight men for having that mentality, because of the way society treats them. But, equally, I - and all trans women - deserve to be showed off, and with someone who's open about being in a relationship with me.

No one wants to be kept a secret. And why should we be? We’re proud of the journey we’ve made, so be proud to show us off.

Don't ever try to 'compliment' me by saying I "don't look trans"
So many people say, "I never could have guessed you were trans". Is that meant to be compliment? I’m not out to trick you, or anyone. It’s not a game. I’m just me. That's how I want to be seen.

See the beauty in my journey I see there’s a real beauty behind a woman’s transition. After going through a lot, we’ve come out as beautiful butterflies. Appreciate our journey and courage. The fear of rejection is real
Rejection is something every human being can fear sometimes. I definitely put on this front that I don’t care, and will say, "I’m fine without you anyway." But I’ll go home and cry my eyes out. I just want to be accepted for who I am.

Being trans doesn't define me
Three years ago, the first thing I’d say if I was approached by a man was, "I'm trans." I was scared of what would happen if they found out later. But then, as time went on, I realised that being trans doesn’t define someone.

Now, I don’t always tell men I date straight away. I will tell them eventually, but I’d rather they get to know me for me, rather than make their assumptions. I'd rather they just got to know me as woman, first.

The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminists, explained Known as TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminist groups are working with conservatives to push their anti-trans agenda.Aimee Stephens had been working in funeral services for 20 years, nearly six of which were at Harris Funeral Homes, when she came out to her boss as transgender.

She had known since she was 5 years old that she was a girl and had been living as a woman outside of work for some time. Though she loved her job at Harris, where she had worked her way up from apprentice to funeral director, she felt she had to hide who she was there. Until she couldn’t any longer.

In 2013, she gave the funeral home’s owner, Thomas Rost, a note that she also shared with friends and colleagues. “I realize that some of you may have trouble understanding this. In truth, I have had to live with it every day of my life and even I do not fully understand it myself,” she wrote. “As distressing as this is sure to be to my friends and some of my family, I need to do this for myself and for my own peace of mind, and to end the agony in my soul.”

After he read the note, Rost simply said, “Okay.” Stephens was fired two weeks later. Rost told her that it was “not going to work out.”

Stephens sued, claiming her dismissal was discrimination on the basis of her sex, setting off a flurry of legal activity. According to court documents, Rost testified that he fired Stephens because “[she] was no longer going to represent [herself] as a man. [She] wanted to dress as a woman.”

Last March, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in her favor. “It is analytically impossible to fire an employee based on that employee’s status as a transgender person without being motivated, at least in part, by the employee’s sex,” the court said in its decision. “An employer cannot discriminate on the basis of transgender status without imposing its stereotypical notions of how sexual organs and gender identity ought to align.”

Harris Funeral Homes appealed to the Supreme Court, which took up the case and will hear oral arguments on October 8.

How anti-trans “radical feminist” groups could affect the outcome of a civil rights discrimination case
In recent weeks, a flurry of amicus briefs have been filed in the case R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC and Aimee Stephens. Major medical organizations, advocacy groups, and legal experts have weighed in mostly in favor of allowing trans people to be free of discrimination at work. Meanwhile, a slew of conservative and religious groups have claimed the right to fire anyone for being trans.Even President Trump’s Department of Justice filed a brief in August arguing in part that Stephens was fired by Harris Funeral Homes not for her gender identity but because she refused to follow her employer’s dress code, which requires men — and by “men,” the DOJ means men of “biological sex” — to wear a suit with pants and women to wear a dress or a skirt. The ACLU attorneys representing Stephens, in turn, argued that their client was fired because Stephens failed to perform the sex role her employer expected of her, violating the legal precedent established in 1989 in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins.

In that case, Ann Hopkins was denied promotions and a partnership because she didn’t look, dress, or behave in a stereotypically feminine enough manner. Her bosses instructed her to wear more makeup and skirts to work in order to get the promotion. The court sided with Hopkins, establishing a legal standard for sex stereotyping that has fundamentally transformed the workplace for women for the past 30 years.

Now that precedent is being put to the test. And joining the Trump administration and conservatives in the fight over sex-based discrimination and stereotypes are several somewhat unexpected allies: so-called “radical feminist” groups with long records of opposing the rights of transgender people.

In their amicus brief to the Supreme Court, the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, writes, “Simply, Aimee Stephens is a man. He wanted to wear a skirt while at work, and his ‘gender identity’ argument is an ideology that dictates that people who wear skirts must be women, precisely the type of sex stereotyping forbidden by Price Waterhouse.”

Groups like WoLF are commonly referred to as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs. They alternate among several theories that all claim that trans women are really men, who are the ultimate oppressors of women. Most of their ideas — like that trans women are a threat to cisgender women’s safety — are based on cherry-picked cases of horrific behavior by a small number of trans people. Above all else, their ideology doesn’t allow for trans people to have self-definition or any autonomy over their gender expression.

“Sex is grounded in materiality, whereas ‘gender identity’ is simply an ideology that has no grounding in science,” WoLF told Vox in a statement. “The redefinition of the word ‘sex’ to mean ‘gender identity’ would have myriad harmful effects on women and girls, and women and girls as a distinct category deserve civil rights protections.”

The key to understanding why a self-proclaimed radical feminist group would side with conservatives arguing for the right to force cisgender women into skirts at work is to understand who TERFs are and what they’ve been up to for the past 50 years. Because now, under the Trump administration and a conservative-majority Supreme Court, their alliance with these far-right groups could have lasting, widespread consequences for trans civil rights — and for the rights of women in general.

TERFs, explained
Online roots of the term TERF originated in the late 2000s but grew out of 1970s radical feminist circles after it became apparent that there needed to be a term to separate radical feminists who support trans women and those who don’t. Many anti-trans feminists today claim it’s a slur, despite what many see as an accurate description of their beliefs. They now prefer to call themselves “gender critical,” a euphemism akin to white supremacists calling themselves “race realists.”

In the early ’70s, groups of what would now be called “gender critical” feminists threatened violence against many trans women who dared exist in women’s and lesbian spaces. For example, trans woman Beth Elliott, who was at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference to perform with her lesbian band, was ridiculed onstage and had her existence protested. In 1979, radical feminist Janice Raymond, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote the defining work of the TERF movement, “Transsexual Empire: The Making of the Shemale,” in which she argued that “transsexualism” should be “morally mandating it out of existence” mainly by restricting access to transition care (a political position shared by the Trump administration). Soon after she wrote another paper — this one published for the government-funded, Health and Human Services-linked National Center for Healthcare Technology — the Reagan administration cut off Medicare and private health insurance coverage for transition-related care.

After those early flashpoints, the dispute between trans people and gender-critical folks simmered for the next 20 years. One exception is the high-profile conflicts at the Michigan Womyn’s Folk Festival, or MichFest, which caught plenty of attention. In the 1990s and early aughts, pro-trans festival attendees organized “Camp Trans,” a space specifically welcoming to trans women who were otherwise banned from attending the event. The two groups clashed for a number of years, until more artists and organizations boycotted MichFest and organizers chose to end the event in 2015.

However, in the past several years, TERFism has found new life and fostered fertile recruiting ground in many online spaces. Though trans people experienced a dramatic increase in visibility with the rise of trans actress Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner’s headline-grabbing transition, that visibility has resulted in a growing cultural backlash. While the majority of that backlash is simply a continuation of the conservative-driven culture war, some extremist “feminists” have decided that trans rights go too far.

TERF ideology has become the de facto face of feminism in the UK, helped along by media leadership from Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London. Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings along accusations of “silencing women” and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper. Australian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went before the UK Parliament in March 2018 and declared that trans women are “parasites,” language that sounds an awful lot like Trump speaking about immigrants.

According to Heron Greenesmith, who studies the modern gender-critical movement as a senior research associate with the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, gender-critical feminism in the UK grew out of a toxic mix of historical imperialism and the influence of the broader UK skeptical movement in the early aughts — which was hyper-focused on debunking “junk science” and any idea that considered sociological and historical influence and not just biology. Those who rose to prominence in the movement did so through a lot of “non-tolerant calling-out and attacking people,” Greenesmith said, much like gender-critical feminism. “Anti-trans feminists think they have science on their side. It is bananas how ascientific their rhetoric is, and yet literally they say, ‘Biology isn’t bigotry.’ In fact, biology has been used as bigotry as long as biology has been a thing.” (See scientific racism, eugenics, and the justification for slavery that black people were intellectually inferior to white people.)

Though TERFism got its start in the US in the ’70s, the ideology has largely fallen out of favor as the country’s mainstream feminist movement has continuously battled against the religious right for abortion access and LGBTQ rights. In a country where political coalitions on the feminist left are crucial to the survival of basic women’s rights, it doesn’t make much sense to spend time oppressing a tiny population who are otherwise valuable allies in the culture war.

Anti-trans rhetoric, though, has power, and anti-trans harassment certainly exists. While the hardcore in-person gender-critical organizing is largely run by a small handful of people, it has become sport for these self-proclaimed feminists to harass and mock trans people and their allies on Twitter and other social media platforms. Check out some of the 80-plus replies to a tweet last month by prominent feminist writer Sady Doyle promoting a piece she wrote denouncing TERFs (some accused Doyle of being a handmaid of the patriarchy, a common insult lobbed at cis women who ally with trans people), or check the inevitable replies to my tweet sharing this piece when it goes online.

But probably where “gender critical” feminism has the potential to wield the most influence is in government. US-based “gender critical” feminist groups like WoLF and Hands Across the Aisle, which sent a letter to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in favor of barring trans women from women’s homeless shelters, are happy to work alongside conservatives to limit the rights of trans people — even if those same conservatives want to pass legislation limiting their reproductive rights.

TERFs treat trans women as predators and trans men as victims of the patriarchy
Gender-critical feminism, at its core, opposes the self-definition of trans people, arguing that anyone born with a vagina is in its own oppressed sex class, while anyone born with a penis is automatically an oppressor. In a TERF world, gender is a system that exists solely to oppress women, which it does through the imposition of femininity on those assigned female at birth.

“Legally redefining ‘female’ as anyone who claims to be female results in the erasure of female people as a class,” WoLF wrote in its SCOTUS brief. “If, as a matter of law, anyone can be a woman, then no one is a woman, and sex-based protections in the law have no meaning whatsoever.”

This conception of gender as a system would be relatively sound if not for the existence of LGBTQ people. Gender- and sex-based oppression can be imposed on a range of people who were assigned male at birth, like gay men and, of course, trans women. In practice, however, the movement more closely resembles an organized hate campaign against a marginalized community — whether that’s through online harassment or filing briefs in landmark civil rights cases.

Adherents to TERF ideology treat trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people much differently. Gender-critical feminists blame the patriarchy for deluding trans men into thinking they can identify out of female oppression, or blame structural homophobia for convincing trans men they can become straight men rather than lesbians.

“The women in our coalition chose to set aside their differences and work together after we saw firsthand the deeply negative and downright dangerous consequences of ignoring bodily sex,” Hands Across the Aisle, an organization that connects radical feminists with anti-LGBTQ groups to campaign against trans rights, said in a statement to Vox. “We watched as doctors enabled irreversible damage to our daughters’ bodies, we sat stunned as boys took away our sisters’ sports opportunities, and we wept as our lesbian friends poisoned their bodies with testosterone in an attempt to appear male.”

For anti-trans activists, establishing a narrative that trans men are really just lesbians attempting to identify out of womanhood is absolutely essential. By doing this, transitioning can be positioned as a form of “conversion therapy,” whereby a lesbian is forced into a male identity and de facto heterosexuality. It opens a pathway for anti-trans activists to ban trans-affirming health care through “conversion therapy” bans.

However, trans men themselves have pointed out that the argument fails to take into account the bodily autonomy of transmasculine people and it is therefore not a feminist position. Trans author Jay Hulme recently described in a recent blog post why and how gender-critical feminists work to get trans men to “return to womanhood” and ultimately detransition.

“As a trans man, I am, and always will be, belittled, disrespected, spoken down to, and patronised, by transphobes,” wrote Hulme. “After all, they think I have been brainwashed and fooled into ‘thinking I’m a man,’ what could I possibly know? What value could my words or experience possibly have? ... This is, again, anti-feminist — the idea that trans men are just foolish women whose words cannot have any value is deeply troubling, and mirrors partiarchal behaviours towards ‘silly girls,’ no matter how old or how accomplished the women in question actually are.”

Nonbinary people, meanwhile, are often dismissed in discussions by gender critical feminists. “Nonbinary people muddle the scientism that anti-trans feminists rely on to justify their gender essentialism, so they choose not to acknowledge [nonbinary] existence or agency,” said Greenesmith. When not erasing them entirely, TERFs will often parrot right-wing rhetoric by mocking nonbinary people, suggesting they are attention seekers who don’t understand their birth sex.

How fear is weaponized against trans women
Gender-critical propaganda is almost entirely focused on the supposed depravity of trans women, citing rare cases to paint trans women as threats to women and children.

TERFs often point to the case of Karen White. White was in prison for sexual assault when she came out as a trans woman and applied for a transfer to a women’s prison. Once there, she allegedly raped several fellow prisoners before she was eventually caught. Prison officials later admitted that they did not follow existing safeguarding procedures in granting the transfer.

As a rape survivor myself, I find White detestable and am outraged that prison officials were so lax with their procedures and allowed White access to a vulnerable population of women. Where I differ from gender-critical feminists is I don’t agree that White is representative of all trans women; gender-critical feminists essentially believe the existence of trans women’s penises in a women’s space represents an automatic risk of rape.

“These are how stereotypes are weaponized against marginalized groups,” Gillian Branstetter, media relations manager at the National Center for Transgender Equality, told Vox. “Given transgender people’s relatively recent rise to public life, and the fact that many people still don’t know a transgender person, we’re very vulnerable to being mischaracterized, to being maligned, and to being drowned out by dog whistles.”

Many gender-critical feminists refuse to contend with the fact that 47 percent of trans women have been victims of sexual assault in their lives, instead questioning the survey methods used to reach the conclusion. However, many trans people don’t see how such questioning is any different from cis men who claim women are falsely accusing men of rape in ever-larger numbers.

This supposed concern for cis women and children has become the primary method for radicalizing gender-critical feminists, similar to how Islamophobes play up threats of gang rape of white women by Muslim men, or white supremacists have historically painted black men as sexual threats to justify segregation. Defending the purity of white womanhood has always been a significant axis of common bigotries, and gender-critical feminism operates in the same fashion. With “stranger danger” drilled into the heads of women and girls from a young age, anti-trans feminists can easily paint “the other” as a constant sexual threat — despite the fact that studies have repeatedly shown that women are most likely to be sexually assaulted by someone they already know.

If trans people are given anti-discrimination protections, WoLF writes in its brief, “it will mark a truly fundamental shift in American law and policy that strips women of their right to privacy, threatens their physical safety, undercuts the means by which women can achieve professional and educational equality, and ultimately works to erase women and girls under the law.”

With its hyperfocus on the supposed threat of trans women in women’s spaces, gender-critical feminism ultimately lets misogynistic men slide under the radar. If everyone is watching for deviant trans women or men claiming to be trans women, who is watching for the respected public figure perpetuating horrific sexual abuse against women and girls?

Online TERFism has infiltrated academia and often manifests into more harassment
While gender-critical feminism has long had roots in academia — extending back to Raymond and her cohorts in the 1970s — renewed public interest in trans discourse has created opportunities for academics to make a name for themselves. Recently, a small handful of gender-critical philosophers have managed to leverage media coverage to gain a mainstream platform from which to express their transphobic views.

“Historically speaking, issues around sexuality and gender have been of relatively marginal importance for philosophy departments, and relatively significant importance for humanities departments and the literary or cultural studies,” Grace Lavery, a trans woman and professor of 19th-century British literature at Berkeley, told Vox. But “that distinction, or that institutional boundary, has begun to fray.”

Gender-critical philosophy has become a sort of cottage industry where previously unheralded academics can achieve an online following by reciting the theory du jour in online radical feminist spaces. British philosopher Kathleen Stock, a self-identifying gender-critical feminist and one of the group’s more authoritative figures, has written perhaps half a dozen different manifestos over the past few years on trans exclusion and the definition of womanhood.

“One of the things I find interesting to watch is the changing in their positions,” said Lavery of gender-critical academics. “I think they imagined that the questions they were asking would have easier answers than they did. I think, for example, they imagined earlier on that it was going to be quite easy to use chromosomes as a basis for a kind of biological sex distinction, binary sex distinction. And they’ve now more or less entirely abandoned chromosomes as a singular determinant, as far as I can tell.”

Graduate philosophy student Christa Peterson has spent quite a bit of time tracking the positions and social media activity of gender-critical philosophers, and she explained why these philosophers seem to change positions so frequently. “What’s happening here is a popular movement that’s coming into academia, rather than these people having philosophical projects on this stuff that gives them these conclusions,” she told Vox. “They’re getting what they’re representing as philosophical conclusions from the gender-critical subreddit and other people on Twitter.”

Earlier this year, Lavery decided to step into the debate because, as a tenured professor, she felt like she was one of the few trans academics in a position to push back on the growing anti-trans rhetoric she was seeing around her. After initially dipping her toe into the discourse, she wrote a piece that was critical of Stock. Two gender-critical journalists shared Stock’s response, and that’s when Lavery really started feeling the heat.

“It led to a massive explosion of online harassment, which I just didn’t see coming at all,” she said. “People in the seemingly hundreds started trying to find me and just write insulting things about me. And that escalated to the degree that it was totally out of control. At one point, people were posting the names and contact details and photographs — not only of me but also of my colleagues at UC Berkeley — online.”

Generally, among academics, the work of their gender-critical peers is viewed as legitimate academic work, trusting the credentials of the philosophers who have jumped into the issue. However, when Stock was invited to speak on her views on gender and sexuality at the Aristotelian Society in early June, her speech drew protests online.

“In recent years and months, attacks on the trans community have been led by a number of prominent philosophers and are made to seem legitimate due to the unwillingness of the wider community to speak up and protect its most vulnerable members,” read a joint statement by Minorities and Philosophy UK and Minorities and Philosophy International. “Not every item of personal and ideological obsession is worthy of philosophical debate. In particular, scepticism about the rights of marginalised groups and individuals, where issues of life and death are at stake, are not up for debate.”

Yet this hasn’t stopped Stock from being published. Her work is cited in several amici briefs to the Supreme Court in the Stephens case, showing how gender-critical academia is assisting to legitimize anti-trans policy positions. In effect, gender-critical academics are laundering the whims of online TERFs into official policy.

Groups like WoLF may have “liberation” in their name, but they have ultraconservative ties
This brings us back to how TERFism can wield great power in policy and politics — and who they will align with to push their ideology forward.

WoLF has made no bones about partnering with misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in order to oppose the livelihoods of trans people to the Supreme Court. In fact, the Stephens case isn’t the first time the two groups have worked together on an anti-trans Supreme Court case. In early 2017, WoLF submitted an amicus brief opposing trans student Gavin Grimm’s lawsuit to use the boys’ bathroom at his school. That case was eventually remanded back to the lower court, which just recently ruled in Grimm’s favor once again.

WoLF’s relationship with ADF extends beyond just filing briefs in key cases. LGBTQNation reported that in fiscal year 2017, the most recent year for which the feminist group’s financial records are available, WoLF applied for and accepted a $15,000 grant from the ultraconservative group. The LGBTQNation report additionally revealed in 2017 that WoLF contracted with Imperial Independent Media for help with fundraising, promising a 20 percent commission. At the time, IIM was run by Zachary Freeman, who made a name for himself over a lawsuit to leak abortion clinic employee names to the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group known for propagating heavily doctored videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood profiting off the sale of fetal tissue.

WoLF defended its deal with Freeman in its aforementioned statement to Vox. “WoLF has never hired anyone who endangered the lives of abortion clinic workers,” it said. “WoLF did once enter into a contract with someone who had previously exercised his rights under the Freedom of Information Act, related to matters that had nothing to do with WoLF.”

Also in its statement, WoLF defended a recent blog post that attacked Planned Parenthood’s commitment to trans-inclusive care. In fact, nearly every blog post on WoLF’s site is anti-trans (posts arguing against trans women in women’s prisons, trans girls in girls sports, trans women in women’s homeless shelters). There is little call to any “feminist” issue that isn’t an attack on trans people at its core.

Though it’s unknown who funds another prominent gender-critical group, Hands Across the Aisle, one of its co-founders is Kaeley Triller-Haver, an anti-abortion conservative who has reportedly admitted to having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old when she was 23, after serving as his youth counselor.

Anti-trans alliances with conservative groups are by no means new for gender-critical feminists. During the Irish referendum on abortion rights in 2018, some British gender-critical feminists withheld support for campaigners who supported abortion rights, citing the trans supportive attitudes of Irish feminism, going so far as to schedule an anti-trans meeting in Dublin at the height of the campaign season. Irish feminists responded with a scathing open letter denouncing the event and reaffirming their support for the womanhood of trans women.

In January, the conservative Heritage Foundation held an event in Washington, DC, featuring members of WoLF to discuss the Equality Act and their opposition to trans rights. Two days later, prominent British anti-trans feminists Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (also known as “Posie Parker”) and Julia Long, who had been in town attending the panel, stormed a Capitol Hill office where Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Sarah McBride had just concluded a meeting between parents of trans children and legislators. (The Heritage Foundation told Vox it had “nothing to do with” Keen-Minshull and Long being in the US and had “no contact with them before or after our January 28 event, and have zero connection to anything they did afterward.”)

They filmed themselves yelling and taunting McBride with their personal gripes with the trans movement, accusing her of not caring about “lesbian girls.” McBride, to her credit, didn’t take the bait, remaining stone-faced and focused on her computer screen while a coworker attempted to deescalate the situation.

Branstetter compares the deployment of so-called feminists to oppose trans rights to the white nationalist movement rebranding themselves as the “alt-right” to achieve a veneer of respectability. “When people call organizations like these TERFs, it’s doing that same job for them,” she said. “It’s portraying it as this divide within the progressive movement or this divide within the LGBTQ community that only serves to benefit people who hate women and the LGBTQ community, including Heritage, the FRC [Family Research Council], and the ADF. Certainly, we should not be shocked that they’re desperate to sort of put up decoys — I just can’t imagine how you can walk through the doors of the Heritage Foundation as a heralded guest and continue to call yourself an advocate for women’s equality.”

In the US, Baltimore gender critical feminist Julia Beck has made a name for herself in conservative circles, appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News and testifying before the House against trans inclusions in the Violence Against Women Act and the Equality Act.

“I sat 10 feet from Julia Beck in the House Equality Act hearing and heard her say the violence faced by transgender women is a myth,” said Branstetter, who noted that anti-trans feminists, like their conservative partners, have begun pushing a claim that trans people do not face much discrimination and violence, an assertion without evidence. “Not 24 hours before she said that, not two miles from where she said that, Ashanti Carmon was murdered on Eastern Avenue in DC. I think it’s telling that they have to promote this trans violence trutherism in order to feel justified in their own hatred.”

According to Greenesmith, Beck employed the diversionary tactic of spouting inaccuracies, forcing those engaged in debate to constantly refute them, rather than engage with the real issues. “Everything she was saying was a lie,” said Greenesmith, referring to Beck’s testimony. “We keep getting trapped in that cycle of proving what she says is wrong … here you and I are saying, ‘But in fact, 24 hours earlier, a trans woman was killed!’ There will always be a trans person getting harmed because that is a reality, but instead of talking [about] why then we need the Equality Act, we’re forced to instead do what happened at the hearing. All the House Democrats and the other witnesses had to contradict Julia Beck. It worked. Having her there worked perfectly.”

Gender-critical feminism doesn’t have the same traction in the US as it does in the UK, but groups still wield power
In fairness, several prominent gender-critical feminists have themselves denounced the movement’s cooperation with archconservatives, such as Jean Hatchet, who cited WoLF’s connection with the ADF in a blog post stating her opposition. But those appeals haven’t appeared to slow down the merging of TERFism with the larger conservative political apparatus.

Just this month, gender-critical feminists who have been banned from Twitter for extensive transphobic harassment have recently organized under the alt-right message board Gab to form “Spinster,” a social media platform for TERFs. It remains to be seen whether the British message board Mumsnet will remain the epicenter for gender-critical messaging, but the movement’s growing connections with anti-abortion and violent misogynist movements should concern both cisgender and transgender women.

According to Branstetter, the recent gender-critical wave has largely failed to gain traction in the US outside of the very far-right spheres. “I don’t think American women are buying it,” she said, pointing out that nearly every major US feminist advocacy group is vocally pro-trans rights and inclusion. “It’s because they understand what it means to be marginalized. They understand that any strict rules placed around gender are to the benefit of nobody.”

Conservative groups, in turn, have made a conscious decision to use feminist language and framing to oppose trans rights, which is how we ended up with some of the most vehemently anti-woman politicians in the House voting against the Violence Against Women Act in the name of “protecting women and girls.”

This unholy alliance — backed up with academic scholarship written by TERFs — could end up having devastating consequences to the standing of women and girls in the US and across the globe. In the Supreme Court case, WoLF is taking the side that claims employers have the right to mandate that women wear skirts by arguing that Aimee Stephens believes that only women can wear skirts. If WoLF truly believed in the abolition of gender, as it claims, it would be petitioning to allow Stephens to present at work in whatever gender she wishes without risk of being fired.

WoLF’s argument reveals the big gender-critical lie: It’s more important to TERFs to put cis women in a stricter box and enforce sex-based dress codes than it is to give trans women equal employment rights. And if TERFs prevail, then all women and nonbinary people lose.

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